Tales of the Naked City

By Richard Lacayo

If you want to know why New York City can survive anything you throw at it, one good place to start is the Louis Faurer retrospective at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. In the 1940s and '50s, when Faurer roamed the streets with his 35-mm camera, New York was already a cyclotron for every human impulse. The saintly and the unsanitary spun around at high speed. In his pictures the city was a place of immigrant bustlers. Raw bloodlines howl from their faces. The streets were full of plump, sexy cars, carnal Fords and pontoon-fendered Buicks. By some reports Faurer could be a difficult, saturnine man. But he had a gift for seizing thunderbolts from New York's crackling air. He made just a handful of great pictures, but in them you find the city we still know--so intricate in mood, so darkly complicated that it's plainly vulnerable. Invincible too.

Faurer was 84 when he died last March--too soon to see this show, which was lovingly assembled by Anne Wilkes Tucker, the museum's curator of photography. It remains in Houston through April 14, then moves to Andover, Mass., San Diego, Chicago and Philadelphia--though, oddly, not to New York City. In the exhibition catalog Louis Faurer (Merrell; 208 pages; $65), Tucker notes that Faurer is one of the "missing links" between the Depression-era documentary photography of Walker Evans and the darker moods and more ragged manner of Robert Frank's great 1958 book The Americans. That's exactly right. Faurer, who grew up in Philadelphia, never attended college or art school. He simply started taking pictures during the Depression, the era of socially conscious "concerned photography." But by the time he moved to New York in 1946, he was discovering a more personal style. If this was "concerned photography," it was concerned not with social conditions but psychic ones--boredom, isolation, acidity, glee, the feral thrusts of the libido and a weirdly sinister expectancy. His new work owed less to Evans and Dorothea Lange than it did to the tabloid-news photographer Weegee, the king of every New York tar pit.

As he looked for ways to make his pictures say more, Faurer became increasingly fascinated with multiple-exposure shots like Accident, New York, N.Y., one of the great photographs of the postwar years. (Faurer's personal archives were messy; we are sure only that the picture was taken sometime between 1949 and 1952.) The nominal subject is a boy turning away from the site of a car accident. At the center of the image is a bit of morbid official graffiti--a chalk outline of the victim's body that is unmistakably phallic, so that love and death are strangely and also childishly intertwined. The boy hugs himself in a gesture that may or may not be dread. His expression is soft and distracted, as though he is thinking over the hard realities of life. But by double exposing the film in his camera Faurer also added to the accident scene a wedding party on the steps of a church. Death and continuity, innocence and experience, street realism and stick-figure abstraction--all in one magnificently congested frame.

After doing the work that he is mostly remembered for in the '40s and '50s, Faurer dedicated himself to fashion photography, to fitful gestures toward filmmaking--he shot some footage of urban street life but never made anything of it--and to cultivating his wounded pride. He was a famously prickly character, fighting with magazine art directors, always aware of himself as an artist denied his due. The LSD therapy he began in 1966 apparently did not do much to make him more congenial. It's no surprise that at his death he had posted in his apartment an old obituary of Orson Welles, the patron saint of misspent genius.

Faurer also knew by then that his name was making its way back into the light. In the 1990s art historians had begun to talk about a mid-20th century "New York School" of loosely affiliated street photographers that included Frank, William Klein, Roy de Carava and Diane Arbus. What we see now is that Faurer was a crucial figure in that circle. Was he a second-tier artist? Absolutely. His output was modest. He lacked Arbus' sure instinct for the uncanny and Frank's psychological scope. But what Faurer saw from that lower perch were some things you do not want to miss.